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Theodore Roosevelt 

An Address by 

The Reverend WiUiam E. Barton, D. D., LLD. 

Minister of the First Church of Oak Park 




N^^ect^rte- (^«r^^tA^^t 



Delivered in 

The First Congregational Church of Oak Park, Illinois, on 
January 12, 1919, the Sunday following the death and 
burial of Ex-President Roosevelt, and revised and repeated 
by request on March 7, 1920 



Oak Park, Illinois 

Advance Publishing Company 

19 2 



Price 25 cents 



Els'] 



Theodore Roosevelt 

By the Rev. William E. Barton, D. D., LL. D. 



A year and a few additional weeks have passed since the death 
of Theodore Roosevelt. It is time to measure our sense of loss, 
and to estimate with such approach to accuracy as may at this time 
be possible, the value of his contribution to American life. We 
cannot do this fully, and it will be many years before we can do it 
adequately ; but we can approach it more nearly than would have 
been possible a year ago, and we gain a measure of value in making 
the attempt at such estimate in close conjunction with our celebra- 
tion of the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington. 

Theodore Roosevelt died Jan. 6, 1919, aged 60 years. He was 
born Oct. 27, 1858. We count that young, and he was young. But 
he was 5 years older than Lincoln, and only 6 years younger than 
Washington. We think of them as old men, and they so thought 
of themselves. Washington was wont to make mention of his age, 
and to say as he put on his glasses that his eyes had grown dim in 
the service of his country. Lincoln, as he left Springfield for his 
inauguration, told his neighbors that he had lived in that town 
from his early manhood until now he was leaving it, an old man. 
Relatively speaking, they both were old ; but there was that about 
Roosevelt which made and kept him characteristically young. His 
vigor, his spontaniety, his versatility, were of a sort that never per- 
mitted us to think of him as a man who was old or even growing old. 

An Outline of His Life 

Let us refresh our memory with a brief outline of the life of 
this remarkable man. Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York 
City Oct. 27, 1858. His father came of an old New York family. 
His mother, Martha Bulloch, was of Southern birth, and had two 
brothers in the Confederate army. Theodore was not precocious, 
and he suffered throughout his childhood from poor health. In 1869 
Mr. RooseVelt took his family to Europe for a year, and Theodore 
is described on his return in 1870 as a tall, thin lad, with legs like 
pipe stems. 

He entered Harvard College in 1876. He was a lover of 
athletics, having grown stronger by persistent exercise, and he was 
a student of nature and of history. He was in his college days, a 
Sunday School teacher, and of a rather militant sort. 

He was graduated from Harvard in 1880, a few months before 



he was 22, and on his birthday in that same year, he married Miss 
Alice Hathaway L.ee. who died, Feb. 13, 1884, at the birth of their 
first child, and within twenty-four hoin-s of the death of Roosevelt's 
mother. 

Before he left Harvard he had written a part of his first book, 
"The Naval War of 1812," and he continued to be a writer until 
his death, his greatest literary work being his "Winning of the 
West." 

The death of his father left him a comfortable fortune, but he 
decided to give his life to the public service. He was elected in 
1882 a member of the General Assembly of New York, at a time 
when Grover Cleveland, then aged 40, was the vigorous young 
governor. 

In 1884 he was a delegate at large to the Republican National 
Convention, in which he opposed the nomination of James G. 
Blaine. After that experience, he went to North Dakota, where for 
nearly two years he lived upon a ranch. At the end of this period, 
he was in vigorous health, and remained, until his last illness, a 
man of extraordinary physical and intellectual vigor. 

On Dec. 2, 1886, he married Miss Edith Kermit Carrow. Es- 
tablishing his home in New York, he devoted himself to writing, 
but was soon in politics again. In 1889. he was appointed Civil 
Service Commissioner by President Harrison, and was reappointed 
by President Cleveland, serving six years, and establishing the 
merit system. 

From 1895 to 1897 he was Police Commissioner of the city of 
New York, and wrought righteousness against mighty odds. In 

1897 he became Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a post which came 
to him because of his first book, "The Naval War of 1812"; but in 

1898 he resigned his position to go to Cuba with the "Rough 
Riders." 

On Jan. 1, 1899, he was inaugurated Governor of New York, 
and in 1900 was elected Vice President. On Sept. 14, 1901, on the 
death of President McKinley, he became President of the United 
States, and on Nov. 8, 1904, was elected to succeed himself by the 
largest popular majority ever received by a presidential candidate. 

In 1909 and 1910 he hunted big game in Africa, and in 1913 
made a tour of South America. He was an unsuccessful candidate 
for President against Mr. Taft in 1912. Long a contributor to 
magazines, he became corresponding editor of the Outlook in 1909, 
and continued in that position until 1914. He was nominated for 
President by the Progressive Party in 1916, but declined and sup- 
ported Judge Hughes, who was not elected. 

On the outbreak of the World War in 1914, he vigorously 
criticized Mr. Wilson's administration for not protesting against 
the invasion of Belgium, and for its conservative policy after the 
sinking of the Lusitania. When America entered the war, he earn- 
estly desired liberty to organize and lead a division of the American 
army in France, but his services were declined by President Wilson. 

&m 

Author 



He gave his sons to the service, and one of them lost his life fighting 
gallantly. Sorrowing deeply for his dead son, he went steadily 
forward in his own work for the nation. 

Seriously weakened by an injury received by him in South 
America, he was taken sick, and died, Jan. 6, 1919. 

Roosevelt as I Knew Him 

I have not known any President intimately, but I have met 
personally and known somewhat Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, 
McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson — a half dozen or so of our 
more recent presidents, and have very clear impressions of them all. 
One gets out of even brief and casual meetings impressions that 
give distinctness to what one reads and hears about a man. Not 
because I knew him intimately, but because I met or heard him a 
good many times at different periods of his career, I speak of 
Theodore Roosevelt as I knew him. 

I first met him in 1895, when he was Police Commissioner of 
New York. He came to Boston, where I then was a pastor, and 
spoke in Trinity Church in the interests of Berea College. President 
Frost of Berea was a guest in my home, and we planned the meet- 
ing together. We had secured the consent of the rector. Rev. E. 
Winchester Donald, to hold the meeting in that church. At a 
similar meeting, followed by a reception in its parish house, I first 
met Gen. William Booth. High church Episcopalians criticized 
Dr. Donald for such uses of the church, but he told me that he sub- 
mitted the matter to his head vestryman, Robert Treat Paine, "and 
Bob Paine said, "May God's lightning strike Trinity Church when 
it becomes too good a place to be used in such a cause !' " 

We had previously asked Chauncey M. Depew to be our 
speaker. What we wanted, frankly, was some one who would 
draw a large and influential audience for President Frost would tell 
about Berea. Senator Depew consented to come; but afterward he 
looked over his clippings and saw how the Boston Transcript had 
])icked him up on some historical inaccuracies when he. a year 
or two previously, had spoken before the Congregational Club, and 
he decided not to risk another visit to Boston with an address as a 
subject on which he could not claim large knowledge. So Presi- 
dent Frost ran to New York to see Dr. Parkhurst, who said, "I 
would come, but there is a man who can serve you better ; he is 
going to be the biggest man in New York if not in the nation." 
So Rcrosevelt was invited and came. He did not know Berea 
personally, but he believed in it, and he spoke earnestly. 

I sat in the end chair in the chancel, where I had a good side 
view of him while he spoke. What impressed me most was the 
power of his jaw as he bit off and spat out his words. He was in 
dead earnest ; he \\as interested in Berea so far as he knew it, and he 
gave a good and effective talk. 

I met him next in the fall of 1898, shaking his hand in the 
crowd at the close of his first Lowell lecture. I had a seat well to 
the front in a packed hall. Boston had not as yet seen her own 



boys who had gone to Cuba ; but Roosevelt, by dint of the Round 
Robin and insistence had brought his troops to Montauk, and had 
broken away for this series of lectures. I think it may have been 
the first time he had been in evening clothes for some time. He did 
not come in khaki and rough-rider hat as later he sometimes did. 
Boston went wild over him; and at that meeting Roosevelt did a 
characteristically modest thing — if you know what that means. For 
men who are most conscious of their powers have all of them a cer- 
tain kind of modesty, and even Roosevelt had a little of it. On that 
day Boston and Baltimore had played the final game in a tied score 
in baseball, and Boston had come out amazingly ahead. We had 
read it in the afternoon papers and been pleased, and forgotten it 
when we went to hear Roosevelt. When he was introduced, and 
stood facing his audience, brown as a nut and hard as nails, and 
"feeling bully," the audience gave him a great and noisy salutation. 
Roosevelt's voice had a habit of breaking into a funny falsetto when 
he said anything that he knew to be funny. His first sentence broke 
in the middle. Pretending that the demonstration was not for him- 
self but in honor of Boston's victory, he said, "I think the score 
was — twelve to tw^o !" The "twelve to two" was in the funny little 
squeak, and was followed by a demonstration even more hearty 
than the first. The lectures, I may mention, were good ; excepting 
those by Henry Drummond, they were the most popular Lowell 
lectures I remember to have heard. He knew his theme, the rela- 
tion of early inhabitants to permanent population, and he used 
much of the material of his "Winning of the West." 

I left Boston in 1899, and early in 1900 I went to New York 
to attend the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in Carnegie Hall. 
At Fort Wayne, we took on another Pullman, in which I found ex- 
President Benjamin Harrison, on his way to New York to preside 
at that meeting. I introduced myself, and he said, "Sit down ; I 
want you to help me. I promised to preside at this meeting without 
realizing what I was getting into. Tell me about these men whom 
I am to introduce." 

He spread out his program, a very elaborate affair, and made 
notes on the margin as I told him about some of the men who were 
announced to speak. On one evening President IMcKinley was to 
be there, and on the same night Mr. Roosevelt, then governor of 
New York. I said, "I have met both of those men, but I think I 
need not tell you anything about either of them." 

He said that he did not need any information about McKinley, 
and he then spoke at length and very interestingly about Roose- 
velt. He said, "I gave him his first national appointment in 1889 
on the Civil Service Commission, and have been watching him with 
great interest ever since. He is a man of great power and great 
ambition, and he has not yet reached his limit. There is just one 
difficulty about Roosevelt ; he is determined to bring in the millen- 
nium before sundown." 

The political pot was already boiling, and politicians and re- 
porters were buzzing around Carnegie Hall wondering what was 



the significance of the coming together of McKinley, Roosevelt and 
Harrison. Harrison was not a candidate and could afiford to joke 
about it ; and he used his prerogatives as presiding officer to get a 
little fun out of the situation. McKinley and Roosevelt both spoke 
heartily in favor of missions; Roosevelt drawing on his material 
from his early life upon the ranch, when he saw the effects of 
missions among the Indians. It was the only time I ever saw three 
Presidents, past, present and future, together on'one platform; and 
I am not sure whether the same thing has ever occurred excepting 
on that night. 

It has been my privilege to attend a good many national con- 
ventions of political parties. I have seen Roosevelt nominated for 
Vice President, and twice nominated for President. He was in 
Chicago when he was nominated Vice President and knew that 
the plan was to shelve him, and resisted it; but really I am sure 
he wanted it; that is to say, while his judgment was against it, he 
really felt the urge within him to get that much nearer the presi- 
dency. His renomination after the death of McKinley was a fore- 
gone conclusion, and was the tamest national convention I have 
ever seen, though much effort was made to pump enthusiasm into it. 

I attended the "Bull Moose Convention" and served as chap- 
lain at one of its sessions when he was nominated. But Roosevelt 
was in great distress of mind at this time. He had hoped to swing 
the Republican convention over; and the governors were behind 
him, but each of those governors had his own political future to 
attend to, and I could tell One or two funny things which I wit- 
nessed while certain governors and senators who had supported 
Roosevelt but who saw that the nomination of Taft was inevitable 
found themselves and their own personal political future between 
the devil and the deep sea. 

I heard him in various political speeches, when he stood at 
Armageddon and battled for the Lord, as he believed and declared. 
I heard him a few times while he was President, notably at 
Provincetown, when he laid the cornerstone of the Pilgrim Monu- 
ment; and I could tell of the resemblances and the contrasts be- 
tween that occasion and another on the same spot three years 
later, when William Howard Taft, then President, dedicated the 
completed shaft, and I sat on the platform where he spoke. 

I was not always on the platform. Sometimes I was struggl- 
ing in the outskirts of the crowd ; but I had a platform seat, and a 
front one, when Roosevelt delivered the Washington address of 
the Union League Club in the Chicago Auditorium — a place where 
I have heard several presidents and other noted men, including 
Cleveland and Taft. 

I spoke of the National Republican Convention that nomi- 
nated Roosevelt after the death of McKinley as devoid of enthus- 
iasm ; it was. But that was because no enthusiasm was necessary. 
I have never seen a man who was more certain to waken en- 
thusiasm than Roosevelt. If I were to pick out the three men 



whose passage through the streets of Chicago have always been 
sure to attract attention, I should name Theodore Roosevelt, Jack 
Johnson and Billy Sunday. 

These things always impressed me when I heard Roosevelt — 
his abounding vitality, his great moral and physical courage, and his 
conviction that he was uttering important and serious truth. He 
was a preacher. So was and is Taft ; so was and is Wilson. So, 
toward the end of his life especially, was Cleveland. So, as every- 
one knows, is and always has been, William Jennings Bryan. Per- 
haps no public servant in his generation used Scripture more or 
used it more aptly than Roosevelt unless it was Thomas B. Reed, 
whom the State Street Church of Portland educated for the min- 
istry, but who went into politics instead. Roosevelt w^as a preacher 
and he meant to be. I heard him many times and on a wide variety 
of subjects, and he was never so happy and never so effective as 
when he was able to define his 'issues in terms of right and wrong, 
and then preach the gospel of the right as he saw it. 

Many of his opinions I did not share ; but he was a great and 
heroic soul. 

One thing more I may mention. I doubt if any man, except 
just now Woodrow Wilson, had a name so widely known or so 
direct an influence with a definite idea of his personality during his 
lifetime as Roosevelt. In Paris, in Berlin, in Rome, in Constan- 
tinople, in Cairo, in Jerusalem, people knew him, were interested 
in him, wanted to hear about him. And many of them knew him as 
"Teddy." 

Some years ago Mrs. Barton and I were in Berlin, with a 
company of friends, and we visited the palace of the gentleman who 
then was Kaiser. It happened to be our wedding anniversary, and 
our friends who were with us staged a little reception in our honor 
in the throne room and, presented to Mrs. Barton a little gift, which 
she still wears. We came out from this quasi-regal ceremony, and 
found the sidewalks crowded, and the police keeping the street 
clear. I inquired of a policeman the occasion of the crowd, and 
he told me that there was an automobile race across the two con- 
tinents of Europe and Asia, and the cars were about to arrive in 
Berlin. They had started from the shore of Spain, had come 
through France, and were to proceed to Constantinople and through 
Russia and Siberia and China to the shore of Asia. W^c stood in 
line for a few minutes, but grew restless. We wanted to see the 
race if it did not take too much time. I asked the policeman to 
inquire where the cars then were and how long we should have to 
wait. He went away and soon returned with the news that the first 
car had already reached the outskirts of Berlin and the others were 
close behind. I inquired further, so as to be sure that his informa- 
tion was reliable ; I wanted to know whether he might have gotten 
his information from some officer just above him w^ho really knew 
no more than he did. He assured me that it was not so ; that his 
information was authoritative. He had it from an official whose 



title he gave me but which I did not understand ; he explained that 
it was the man above the chief of police, and then, to make it per- 
fectly plain, he said, "the same that Teddy' was before he became 
Governor of New York !" 

I was in Florence, and I passed the small shop of two marble 
cutters, brothers, as I learned, who did a business in a place a little 
below the level of the sidewalk, and who sold their work to tourists. 
Pasted in the window was a lithograph of Theodore Roosevelt. 1 
stopped to look at it, and just beyond the picture, I saw the man 
himself. He was attired as a marble cutter, with mallet in one 
hand and chisel in the other, and he wore the smock of his trade. 
But no one could fail to see the resemblance to the picture, though 
the clothing was fully different. He stood in the exact pose of the 
lithograph, and loked the image of Roosevelt. I went inside, and 
walked up to him, and his face broke out in one of Roosevelt's own 
grins, and he approached to greet me. 

It was a clever bit of advertising, and the effective use of facial 
and physical resemblance for purposes of trade and popular interest. 

This Italian marble-cutter and his brother knew Theodore 
Roosevelt as well as I did, not only how he looked, but how he 
acted, and what in general were his characteristics. 

The Berlin policeman knew Roosevelt not only as the man who 
had been President of the United States ; he knew that before he 
was President he had been Governor, and before he was Governor 
he had been Police Commissioner. He knew the man and the 
essential facts of his career; and he knew his pet name, "Teddy." 

The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was on April 28, 1917. 
The United States had just entered into the world war. He came 
to Chicago and was tendered a dinner at the La Salle, and after- 
ward spoke to as many men as could be packed into the ballroom 
of the hotel. He was eager to go overseas. He did not ask to be 
put in command of a regiment or division, but asked to be made 
second under an officer of military experience, "Although," he said 
playfully, "I have commanded a regiment in actual warfare, and 
have been Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the 
United States." In my judgment, the administration made a mis- 
take in not permitting him to go. He would have been a brave of- 
ficer, and his presence on the l)attlefield would have been an inspira- 
tion to our American soldiers. Who of them would not have gone 
over the top with him, and done it rejoicing? He had the ability 
to inspire young men. In the Republican Convention that was 
gathered to renominate President Taft, there were times when the 
crowd broke all bounds yelling, "We want Teddy !" Our boys in 
France wanted him, and he wanted to go. But his message on that 
day related only incidentally to his personal desire to serve his 
country on the battlefield. It was the call of America to rise to its 
opportunity and manifest its mission to the world. While he was 
speaking it seemed to me that, 

One blast upon his bugle-horn 
Was w^orth a thousand men. 



I shall always remember him as I saw him last, rejoicing that 
his country was going forth on a crusade for righteousness, and 
eager to have a personal share in the danger and the sacrifice and 
the glory of adventure. 

Roosevelt's Struggles, and Lincoln's 

He who studies the career of Theodore Roosevelt can but be 
impressed by the story of the early struggle, by means of which he 
attained to vigorous health. At his birth he seemed doomed to be a 
life-long invalid. Those who knew his childhood remember him 
first of all as a patient, uncomplaining sufferer. Night after night 
he gasped for breath and it then seemed he never could become a 
vigorous, healthy lad. By sheer strength of will he devoted himself 
to those physical exercises which gave him muscles like steel and a 
constitution capable of great endurance. Unlike Lincoln, he had 
no struggle with poverty, but he came to his own through rigorous 
self-discipline and out of weakness Avas made strong. 

We are impressed, also, with the heroism of his early devotion 
to the public welfare. He inherited money enough so that he could 
have lived without work, and his frail health might have seemed 
ample justification for his living upon his inheritance. But he 
entered into politics determined to find a field of service, and he 
lived and wrought as Christopher Wren is justly declared to have 
done in that eloquent epitaph above the door of St. Paul's, "Non 
sibi, sed pro bono publico." Ambitious he doubtless was, but his 
was an ambition which rose above inertia and self-seeking " and 
made Him from the beginning of his life a man devoted to the public 
welfare. 

His Immense Virility 

Whoever saw Col. Roosevelt was impressed by his genuine 
humanity and his immense virility. He believed in large families; 
he felt that America must stand or fall with its family life. But in 
his maleness was the virility of the athlete, not the excessive 
sexuality of the degenerate. He stood for vigor without self-in- 
dulgence. 

Theodore Roosevelt lived intensely, but not narrowly. What- 
ever he did, he did it with his might. He appeared to have no 
subordinate interests. What he read and what he studied he 
read and studied with equal ardor, if not with equal interest. He 
did not have a single-track mind ; his mind was a net-work of 
tracks, on any one of which he could run with the throttle wide 
open and his eye on the rails. 

He lived intensely, and he did not cease to live in that fashion. 
Many people live intensely for a little time and then grow weary 
and react into lethargy. It appears impossible to hold the interest 
of the average man strongly and loyally for any great length of 
time. It was not so with Roosevelt. He lived the strenuous life 
and continued to live it. The warmth of his keen interest did not 
die down to cold ashes, nor even to the gentle glow of hot coals ; 
to the end of his life he was a flaming torch. 



It has been said with some justice that Roosevelt might better 
have lived more slowly and lived longer; but who knows that? A 
recent essayist has said : 

"Roosevelt was so active a person — not to say so noisy and conspicu- 
ous: he so occupied the center of every stage, when he died, it was as 
though a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band had stopped 
playing. It was not so much the death of an individual as a general 
lowering in the vitality of the nation. America was less America, because 
he was no longer here. He should have lived twenty years more had he 
been willing to go slow, to loaf and invite his s'oul, to feed that mind of 
his in a wise passiveness. But there was no repose about him, and his 
pleasures were as strenuous as his toils. John Burroughs telk' us that he 
did not care for fishing, the contemplative man's recreation. Xo contem- 
plation for him, but action; no angling in a clear strearn for a trout or 
grayling, but the glorious, dangerous excitement of killing big game- 
grizzlies, lions, African buffaloes, mountain sheep, rhinoceroses, elephants. 
He never spared himself: he wore himself out. But doubtless he would 
have chosen the crowded hour of glorious life — or strife, for life and strife 
v\»ere with him the same." — From "Four Americans" by Henry Augustin 
Beers. 

When Phillips Brooks was leaving the scene of his early min- 
istry in Philadelphia to accept a call to Trinity Church in Boston, 
an elderly minister of his denomination congratulating him upon 
his promotion, said, "And now, my dear young brother, be prudent." 
"Stop," said Mr. Brooks, "if there is any one quality which a min- 
ister of the Episcopal Church does not need to cultivate it is 
prudence." 

Theodore Roosevelt would have agreed with him. Prudence 
was one of the last of the virtues which he cultivated. Of him 
instead of George Luther Stearns, Whittier might have written, 

"Ah, w^ell! — the world it,* discreet: 

There arc plenty to pause and wait; 
But here was a man who set his feet 

Sometimes in advance of fate, — 
"Plucked ofif the old bark when the i'nner 

Was slow to renew it. 
And put to the Lord's work the sinner 

When saints failed to do it." 

Roosevelt impressed all men who met him with his tremendous 
vitality. To a cynical observer like Henry Adams, inclined to 
inertia and to critical analysis, such a man was an enigma, if not 
an anathema. Of him, Adams said, "Roosevelt, more than any 
man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primi- 
tive quality that belongs to ultimate matter — the quality mediaeval 
theology assigned to God — he was put act." (The Education of 
Henry Adams, p. 417.) 

One always felt this quality in Roosevelt. I saw him once 
in the White House, dressed in a sack coat, moving swiftly from 
one item of business to another, seeming to make his decisions 
before anybody could tell him what he w^as deciding — a very 
great contrast to the calmness and quiet dignity which I have ob- 
served in other presidents. I have seen him a few times when he 
felt himself to be among friends and he laughed loudly and slapped 



his thigh and applauded boisterously when a good story was told, 
or a song sung, but I am told by those who knew him well, and I 
can believe it, that his boisterousness never lent itself to vulgarity 
and that his conversation, which dealt with delicate matters in 
plain speech, abhorred any approach to obscenity. 

To me he seemed to have complete faith in the infallibility of 
his own judgment. He would almost have seemed to meet that 
qualification for infallibility, which Cardinal Newman before he 
went over to Rome, expressed concerning the Pope : 

"The Pope's claim to infallibility implies an additional claim. 
He must not only be infallible, but infallibly certain that he is in- 
fallible." Few Popes have been thus certain. They have usually 
left for themselves certain loop-holes for escape, in case it should 
later appear better for them not to claim to have been speaking ex 
cathedra. But Roosevelt never appeared to be troubled by any 
doubt on this score. Carlyle might have applied to him the word, 
which he uttered concerning Bismarck in 1866 after he had brought 
Austria to her knees : 

"He is the only man who has been appointed by Almighty 
God his Vicegerent on this earth, and who knows that he has been 
appointed." 

Yet those who knew Mr. Roosevelt best declared that behind 
his impulsiveness there was a genuine deliberation. In 1911 I sat in 
his office in the editorial rooms of The Outlook and talked with 
his associates concerning him. They told me that there was no 
man on the staff "of The Outlook who was more considerate of 
the opinions of the other men, or one whose choices were made 
after more mature deliberation. Lawrence Abbott said to me on that 
occasion, "You know my father well, and you do not think of him 
as an impulsive man. Theodore Roosevelt is a more deliberate 
man than Lyman Abbott." I accept testimony such as this from 
the men who knew him intimately. Personally, I should not have 
thought him a deliberate man. He said of himself, "You think me 
impulsive, and perhaps I am: But I will tell you one thing: Never 
have I entered upon any great policy till I was satisfied that I had 
behind me a great body of the American people." 

He was outspoken in his denunciation of "the timid good" and 
the "acidly cantankerous." He had a passion for justice, a tower- 
ing ambition, a tremendous industry, a perfectly terrible sincerity. 

Says his latest biographer, William Roscoe Thayer: 

"Those of us who knew him knew him as the most astonishing ex- 
pre^'iion of the creative spirit we had ever seen. His manifold tale'nts, 
his protean interests, his tireless energy, his thunderbolt'^ which he did 
not let loose as well as those he did: his masterful will, sheathed in self- 
control like a sword in its scabbard, would have '-ende'-ed him sunerhuman 
had he not pos^sessed other qualities which made him the best of playmates 
for mortals." 

He had a towering ambition ; so had Washington ; so had Lin- 
coln ; but I do not think it was a selfish ambition. He was accused 



of wanting to be a king. A recent editorial in The Outlook giv^s 
his characteristic reply, which he uttered with his characteristic 
break of voice and falsetto squeak': 

"They don't know kings, and I do. A. king is a cross between 
a perpetual Vice President and a leader of the Four Hundred." 

Roosevelt was not ambitious to be king, because he knew he 
was greater than a king. 

His Claim to Greatness 

Was Roosevelt a great man? He denied it. He said that he 
was not a genius. Speaking at Cambridge University he denied 
being either an athlete or a man of exceptional ability, but he 
claimed that in body and mind he endeavored to get the most pos- 
sible out of such talents as he possessed, and this he believed to be 
the foundation of success. He said : 

"I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor life, 
and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory is that 
most any ma'n can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible 
service out of the (lualitics that he actually possesses. * * The average man 
who is successful — the average statesman, the average public servant, the 
average soldier, who wins what what we call great success — is not a genius. 
He is the man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares witii 
his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than 
ordinary degree." 

As I saw Roosevelt, I cannot say that I was ever impressed 
with his greatness. He impressed me as a man of marvelous 
energy, a man of heroic ptn-pose, of masterful resolution, of protean 
versatility. I never regarded him as a profound thinker, a man of 
philosophical acumen or exceptional reasoning power. His logical 
process appeared to me to be only the straight-forward application 
of common sense to the problem at hand. Nor was he an orator. 
His voice was harsh, and he abused it. It assailed the ears of his 
hearers with monotonous insistence, broken by occasional squeak- 
ings of falsetto. 

His delivery was not pleasing. His one gesture was the ham- 
mer-blow of a clenched fist driving his point into the mind of the 
hearer. His facial expression was the tense scowl of a man of 
defective vision vehemently intent upon the business of biting oflf 
his argument in emphatic mouthfuls and spitting out his words as 
hard and as far as he was able. He was not precisely a pretty man ; 
and the photographs of his face when he was speaking left little 
for the caricaturist to desire. The man who applied the term 
"gargoyle" to his appearance when addressing an audience was 
in his way as apt a phrase-coiner as Roosevelt himself when he 
condemned "pussyfooting" or hurled maledictions against the 
"malefactors of great wealth." 

Moreover. Roosevelt had little of the art of persuasion, nor 
did he convince his hearers that he was impartial or judicial in all 
his utterances. I always felt that he was too intense to be judicial, 
and I seldom fotmd mvself followino- his areument with unotialified 



approval. His very vehemence suggested that there must be some- 
thing to be said on the other side, and his impetuosity raised the 
(question whether he had carefully considered the subject in all its 
possible bearings. 

But I never heard him when I doubted that he believed utterly 
every word that he was saying. I never was able to doubt for a 
moment his good faith or terrible earnestness. He could have said 
with the apostle, that he believed and therefore spoke ; and he 
spoke with the assurance of a prophet of civic righteousness. 

This, I believe, and not genius, was the secret of his success. 
I can hardly think of him as a great man in the sense that Wash- 
ington seems to me to have been great. He did not tread the high 
levels of serene elevation of mind and character which we associate 
with the name of Washington. He did not descend into the depths 
of human sympathy which we contemplate with reverence when 
we think of Abraham Lincoln. But in his emphatic determination to 
know what was right and to do it, to give every normal interest 
"a square deal" and in the pursuit of any good end to "hit the line 
hard" he was a noble servant of his generation, and he personified 
the best in moral earnestness in the contemporary life of America. 

Colonel Roosevelt knew that many people thought of him 
as belligerent, and ready to fight all comers at the drop of the hat. 
This suggestion woke his ready wit, and reminded his friends that 
during his administration of seven years his country was pro- 
foundly at peace with all nations ; that he never began a war, but 
that he ended the war between Russia and Japan ; that he was not 
an advocate of war, but the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize of 
$40,000. As to his personality, he denied that he was pugnacious, 
but asserted that he was "an elderlv literarv gentleman with strong 
domestic tendencies!" 

There was much of real truth in this; and as to his domestic 
tendencies, it is to be remarked that no President has succeeded in 
preserving in the White House a more normal home life, or one 
which he kept more free from the intrusion of the public, and that 
he gave tohis country sons whose valor and public spirit are wor- 
thy of their heredity and training. One of his sons, in reply to a 
comment on the fact that they were all in service, said, "Father has 
been preaching patriotism all his life, and it is up to his sons to 
make good on their home teaching." 

What Would Roosevelt Have Done to Germany? 

It does not lie within the province of this address to compare 
Roosevelt with Wilson. Two men more unlike in temperament 
would be difficult to imagine, but we can hardly deny ourselves 
the privilege of some curiosity as to what would have happened 
if Roosevelt had been in the White House on the morning of April 
2^, 1915. when the New York Times printed a paid advertisement, 
inserted by the representatives of the German Government in 
America, warning Americans not to sail on the Lusitania on her 
next voyage. In Thayer's new biography of Roosevelt he relates 



that he asked Roosevelt what he would have done under those 
conditions. He answered that he would have sent at once for 
Bernstorf and asked him whether the advertisement was official 
and he was sure Bernstorf, arch-liar that he was, could not have 
denied it. "I should then have sent to the Department of State to 
prepare his passports; I should have handed them to him and said, 
'You will sail on the Lusitania yourself next Friday ; an American 
guard will see you on board and prevent your coming ashore.' " 

Under those conditions we might possibly have had war with 
Germany sooner than we did, but the Lusitania would not have 
sunk. 

'His Religion 

There is another quality in Roosevelt which I must not fail to 
mention. He was a religious man. When he was a student in 
Harvard University, he took his stand as a young man who cared 
for religion. He w^as a Sunday School teacher in those days, 
though decidedly a militant one. 

In writing of Mr. Roosevelt's young manhood Mr. Thayer 
says : 

"Theodore taught Sunday School at Christ Church, but he was so mus- 
cular a Christian that the decorous vestrymen thought him an unwise guide 
in piety. For one day a boy came to class with a black eye which he had 
got in fighting a larger boy for pinching his sister. Theodore told him 
that he did perfectly right — that every boy ought to defend any girl from 
insult — and he gave him a dollar as a reward. The vestrymen decided 
that this* was too flagrant approval of fisticuffs; so the young teacher soon 
found a welcome in the Sunday School of a different denomination." 

Roosevelt's religion was simple, unostentatious and genuine. 
He made no parade of it, neither did he ever conceal it. His ad- 
dresses were sermons ; they made free use of Scripture, which he 
employed with telling effect. He met the sorrows that came to him 
with a courage that belongs to sincere Christian faith. He lived 
and died a professed and earnest follower of Jesus Christ. He was 
a muscular Christian, a red-blooded Christian, a militant Christian, 
a Christian whose religion represented in manly form the qualities 
of the heroic virtues of his own nation and his own time. 

Roosevelt's minister called him "America's most typical Ameri- 
can." The characterization is not unjust. But a man may typify 
a thing and not always justly represent it. A type may become 
so generic as to lose all individuality. Theodore Roosevelt never 
became so typical as to lose one whit of his individuality. He 
never said to himself, "I will seek to be the typical American." He 
was Theodore Roosevelt, by the grace of God; American, and was 
true to type. 

America can never live on the names of her great men in 
the past. She must create new heroes out of the stuff of her com- 
mon manhood. She must take of the dust of her ordinary life 
and breathe her breath into it and make a living soul that has man- 
hood and a name. America is born to hero-worship, a kind of 



irreverent hero worship that often whips the gods it prays to, but 
hero-worship none the less. The mind of America demands con- 
creteness ; it learns by object lessons. 'J he whole nation has in it 
this much of the characteristic which it attributes to one state 
southwest of us — it wants to be shown. It wants to be shown 
concretely. It demands personality. It can never worship an 
abstract formula ; it wants character erect and afoot. 

Henry Dufif Traill was not thinking of German history but of 
that of his own nation, England, when he wrote his warning poem: 

"As one who from the glacier past the vine 
Follows the slow debasement of the Rhine 
To where its foiled and sluggish waters creep 
Through sand-obstructed channels to the deep." 

Even so, warned the poet, nations of noble birth and glorious 
history confront the peril of the Rhine with its giacier-born source, 
its vine-fringed course, and its muddy and sand-clogged estuary. 
Such fate will never come to America so long as out of her common 
manhood she produces great characters, and then by the consensus 
of her wisdom, she selects these men to be her prophets and rulers. 

These men must represent all the various types of success and 
walks of life : but one poet would be worth to Chicago, more than 
ten packers, and one prophet of the soul more than ten poets. 

A nation's commercial prosperity depends upon the fertility 
of its soil, the abundance of its natural resources in timber and in 
minerals, the activity of its workshops, its convenient and economi- 
cal means of transportation within its own domain and its access 
to the ocean for foreign trade. But a nation's real greatness can- 
not be measured wholly in terms of commercial prosperity. A 
nation is not necessarily great because it is big nor prosperous be- 
cause it is rich. 

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey. 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay." 

The final test of a nation's greatness is the quality of manhood 
which it produces. We who live in America, and who are under 
constant temptation to confuse greatness with bigness, need to re- 
mind ourselves again and again that America's true glory is not to 
be found in the capacity of her grain elevators or the size of her 
bank clearings or the magnitude of her coal mines or the number of 
acres in her stock-yards, but in the equality of her manhood. The 
real ground of America's glory is the character of her great men. 
Let America plow her fields until her harvests are multiplied ten- 
fold ; let her dig her mines to the center of the earth with ever in- 
creasing reward for her labor and inventive genitis ; let her bind 
the tides of Atlantic to those of Pacific with a hundred transconti- 
nental railways, let the steamship bear the stars and stripes to 
every port in the seven seas ; still is her supreme glory in none of 
these. It is in the genius, the patriotism, the nobility of soul 
revealed in her George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and 
John Marshall ; her John Adams and Thomas Jefiferson and hSenja- 



mill Franklin ; her Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay and Dauie) 
Webster ; her Charles Sumner and Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham 
Lincoln ; her William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. 

Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt 

A half century and more ago the Boys in Blue went forth to 
put down the rebellion, and they sang much of hanging Jeff Davis 
to a sour apple tree. When the war was over, it was not JefiFerson 
Davis who was buried, but Abraham Lincoln. And the death of 
Lincoln did for America what the death of Davis never could have 
wrought. 

Another war has been fought and won. Our boys went out 
vowing that they would bring back to America the scalp of the 
Kaiser. The man who was the kaiser lives, but the world weeps 
at the grave of Theodore Roosevelt. 

The two dea^'^s are not completely parallel. The death of 
Lincoln, so tragic, so shocking, had elements that do not enter 
into the death of Roosevelt. We cannot add him to our list of 
martyr presidents, thank God, but we have added him to our list 
of national heroes. We can say of him as Stanton said when 
Lincoln breathed his last, "Now he belongs to the ages." 

He belongs to the ages as Lincoln belongs to them, as Ameri- 
ca's typical and triumphant contribution to the ideals of humanity. 
He was American as in his day George W^ashington was American. 
He was American as Lincoln was American, and the world is 
learning every day how well the name Lincoln spells America. 
In an age when the world interpreted the American ideal in terms 
of dollars and cents, Theodore Roosevelt stood as the embodiment 
of American energy, American scholarship, American courage, 
American character devoted to the public good, and above all, as 
the incarnation of the American conscience. 

What was the greatest contribution which Theodore Roosevelt 
made to the life of his generation? This, as it seems to me, that in 
the eyes of America and the world, he defined anew in terms of 
personality, the ideal of America. The world had need of such a 
representation as he set forth of our national character and ideals. 
I'he world had seen or thought it had seen America's character 
defined in terms of money and the love of 'it. America needs, 
and the world needs, continually to correct its easy definition of 
Americanism. We need to know and to have it known that 
America is a nation of idealists. The world learned that anew in 
Theodore Roosevelt. 

With the death of Roosevelt there has gone out of American 
life a mighty reinforcement of all that was best in the spirit of 
America. The heart of America bows with grief at his death, "as 
when a standard-bearer falleth." He stood so fearlessly, so tena- 
ciously, so unconquerably for the things that America best loved 
and most believed in, he seemed the incarnation of our ideal and 
hope. 

For sixty-five years from his death until the close of the Civil 



War, America found its ideal in George Washington. From the 
day of his assassination in 1865 until now, the nation has expressed 
its ideal in the words and characteristics of Abraham Lincoln. 
We now have a third name to add to this noble pair. Theodore 
Roosevelt in his day defined in terms of flesh and blood the name 
American. 

Pious people of a former generation were much devoted to 
inquiry as to the last words of a dying man or woman ; we are 
not yet wholly past it, and the newspapers have been quoting 
Rosevelt's last published utterance on the aboltion of the hyphen 
from American citizenship. "We have room," he said, "for only 
one flag, the American flag; and this excludes the red flag. We 
have room for but one language, and that the English language." 

But if I were to choose of his public utterances what I think 
he might have been g-lad to have us think as his creed of American 
life and destiny, it would be this : 

"We here in America hold in our hands the hope of the world, 
the fate of coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if 
in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed ; if we train in the 
dust the golden hope of men." 

He who was buried a little more than a year ago in a village 
cemetery on Long Island, with a dignified simplicity and absence 
of ostentation which are a commendable example to his country- 
men, worthily served America by his loyalty, his patriotism and 
his militant courage, and left that country immeasurably richer for 
the heritage of his example and his name. We do well to honor 
him ; for the honor in which the world held his nation before he was 
born is greatly enhanced by his life and service. 

W^ell may the circling aeroplanes hover lovingly above; his 
grave, and drop their wreaths upon the last resting place of the 
man wdio gave himself, his four sons, and all his love and ardent 
hope to America. And well may America pause when such a man 
dies, and lift its reverent heart to God in thanks that America still 
has in her the stufl:' for the making of such manhood. Here was 
a man who hurled back into the teeth of the w^orld the lie that 
American character can be expressed in terms of money. Here 
was a man who lived greatly and simply and triumphantly, and 
whose personality and ideals kindled the imagination of his coun- 
try, and no one thinks to ask how^ much money he had. By 
force of character, by devotion to the public welfare, by fearless 
love of rightetDUsness, and by faith in God and in the American 
people, he wrought righteousness, obtained promises, subdued 
kingdoms, dug the Panama Canal, reclaimed vast tracts of desert 
territory and made it blossom like the rose, and exalted in the 
minds of all men everywhere the world's definition of an American. 
Pie has made it for every one of us who faces the duties of life 
in like spirit, a nobler thing to be an American. 



The Soul of 
Abraham Lincoln 

By WILLIAM E. BARTON 



A notable contribution to the litera- 
ture of the subject, and a book of 
permanent worth 



Published by George H. Doran Co. 

of New York, and for sale at 

regular price, $4, by 

ADVANCE PUBLISHING CO. 
Oak Park, Illinois 



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